When to Pause an Ad

Yes, you can always pause an ad or keyword within your ad group, but the bigger question is when to pause an ad for better performance.  From your ad group, you always have the option to pause a single keyword of your choice at any given time. 

Once paused, the selected keywords will stay paused until you decide to let them run again.

You may pause an ad for many reasons, including to save your Google ad quality scores.  Your Adwords quality score affects your Pay-per-click (PPC) account and it makes sense to learn when to pause an ad for this important reason.  Remember too that everything that you do today affects what happens to your Google Adwords quality score in the long run.  Constantly optimizing your PPC performance will have a great impact on your quality score in the future.  The longer your ads run over time, your costs in PPC should turn out to be lesser as long as your ads are in the top positions and are good performers.

Knowing When to Pause an Ad Helps Improve Quality Score

I did not know about this until recently.  Incidentally, I just realized I can work my way with my ad texts and groups to improve my Google Quality Score.  When you pause an ad, it will still have an effect on your ad performance.  You pause an ad when it is no longer performing.  In fact, you can even go to the extent of deleting keywords or ads that are performing poorly.

If you know when to pause an ad, you will be able to improve your quality score.  Pausing or deleting a group of high performing ads or keywords will generate quality score based on the poor performing and medium performing keywords of that group.  In other words, there is no difference between pausing or deleting ads if you are talking about its effects on your quality score.  Your quality score is an aggregate of the performance of all of your keywords and ad campaigns.

To illustrate this better, let’s say you have a total of 100 ads or keywords running live.  From this example, out of the 100 that’s live, there would be about 50 that are performing very well, with another 25 that are just ok, and 25 which are poor in performance.  When you pause all of the 50 ads that are performing well, you will have a quality score that is generated from the poor and just ok performers.  This drops your overall quality score.

But what happens if you pause only the poor performing ads?  You will definitely have better results, which makes a lot of sense.  This is why you need to know when to pause and ad at the right time for better ad performance.  To some people, this is something new, and you might want to try it too for you to see its impact yourself.

Pausing an Ad Easily to Improve Ad Performance

Remember that if you pause an ad group  or overall campaign, your ads and keywords in that group or campaign will also stop from running live.  Google Adwords Help taught me how to pause an ad.  Once you are logged in to your Google Adwordsa account, you need to pick the ad group and campaign that you would want to edit.  You can pick the Keywords tab if you like to pause a keyword.  If you would like to pause an ad, you can choose the Ad Variations.  Tick the checkbox right next to the ad or keyword that you would need to pause.  You will see a “Pause” button at the top of the table which you can click on to pause the chosen ads and keywords.  If you like to run the paused keywords or ads again, you may click the “Unpause” button.

The more experienced in Google Ads suggest pausing or deleting ads and keyword to have better Quality Score.  This is to eliminate poor performance which will affect your overall account history.  With the poor performers paused or deleted, you will improve your quality score over time as the negative impact of the poor performing ads or keywords will be diluted with the high performing scores over time.  Knowing this, I hope you already understand when to pause an ad at the right time to help you increase your PPC ads performance.